Yenupini Joyce Adams is a visiting assistant professor of global health in the Keough School of Global Affairs. She also has an affiliation with Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health. Before coming to Notre Dame, Adams was an assistant professor in the WellStar School of Nursing at Kennesaw State University. She earned her PhD from the College of Nursing at Michigan State University and her bachelor of science in nursing from Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her clinical expertise is in maternal/newborn nursing (RNC-MNN). Adams is passionate about using research and community interventions to improve maternal health, promote safe motherhood, and decrease maternal mortality and morbidity among vulnerable populations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa, where the burden of maternal mortality is most severe.
Adams’ research aims to address maternal health disparities that lead to mortality. She particularly examines factors, both patient and healthcare facility centered, that influence access to and quality of postpartum care among vulnerable populations. Under these broad research goals, she is currently pursuing two research tracks at the intersection of postpartum complications and maternal mortality: 1) maternity care providers’ knowledge, teaching and management of potential complications, and 2) women’s knowledge of and care-seeking for postpartum complications. Her research is guided by and contributes to the Three Delays Model originally developed by Thaddeus and Maine (1994). Adams’ future work will focus on developing interventions to improve postpartum outcomes. While Adams’ research focuses mainly on access to and quality of postpartum care, she has also done work on women’s preconception reproductive knowledge and other maternal health issues.
Adams has received research grants from national nursing organizations such as the American Nurses Foundation and the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses and published in peer-reviewed journals in nursing such as Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, Journal of Nursing Scholarship, and Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic and Neonatal Nursing . She was the recipient of the 2020 New Investigator Award by the Midwest Nursing Research Society women’s health and transitions in childbearing research interest group. She was also a recipient of the AACN/Johnson & Johnson Minority Nurse Faculty Scholars Award by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (2013).